Page 130 of The Wild Beneath

For what duration she was under, she doesn’t know.

She scans the horizon, the waves, the boat deck.

Walker is gone.

Ebb

The cycle begins again. Having done what was needed, the water returns to itself.

Chapter 53

Eight months after

Evan Hale loves late September in Hale’s Landing.

An omnipresent fog hangs in the sky. The leaves burst into tangerine and gold while moss drips with rain. A cool wind blows.

The front porch of Ruth’s cabin still creaks. The peeled cedar logs smell the same as they did when he was a kid. The cabin is as spare and utilitarian as it was; the same chipped ceramic plates, cast-iron and copper pans. A dented kettle lives on the wood stove. Shells line each windowsill.

He eats the same cereal every morning with his favourite spoon, the one with moon cycles engraved onto the handle. He still wears the same black work coveralls, with the Hale Timber insignia between his shoulder blades.

But some things have changed.

The day Annie went north on the barge in February, he went straight to the public library. Why would he have gone there? To this day, he remembers it like a fugue state. An elderly librarian—­with a rainbow of bracelets, glasses on her nose and another pair tucked into her nest of grey-white hair—­led him up a spiral staircase to a narrow section on sustainable forestry.

“I guess I could have looked this all up online,” he said.

“It’s better to feel a book in your hands,” she replied. Her bracelets jangled when she patted his shoulder.

He sat in a wing chair in a corner, alone, tearing up, thinking of Annie while devouring word after word; wondering if he could be redeemed.

The following week, Evan resigned from the coast guard and went north. He knew he had no choice. When he arrived, Henry grabbed him by the shoulders and pulled him into a hug.

“She called in fromPolaris,” he said.

“Polaris?”

“She’s sailing south on her own. She sounded strong.”

Evan stayed put. In the following months, he hiked every inch of the Hale Timber land. As the weather warmed, he trekked over more and more terrain, through the underbelly of mulch, salal, and sword fern, underneath trees of towering majesty. He measured the oldest growth, graphed the area’s remaining inhabitants by hand on large topographical maps he stuck to the office wall.

Evan hung a photo of Celeste next to his maps. She would have loved this.

Ed Hollingsworth hung his head and told him he was ready to retire.

Evan walks the forest every day like a pilgrim. The oldest trees—­the ones that touch the sky—­seem to reach down to touch him, too. He presses his cheek against the trunks of many of them, the same way he did as a child. What do these trees want to tell him now?

The answers are coming, slowly, flowing through cambium five hundred years thick. His sense of gravity is returning. He invites in foresters, naturalists, Indigenous elders; experts of all kinds arrive in Hale’s to talk with him about the trees.

“Call and response,” a craggy old forester from Clayoquot Sound tells him one evening beside a smouldering campfire. He’s one of the ones that put his own body in the way of theloggers and ended up in court. “Bring your questions to the trees themselves. You’ll get your answers.”

Evan collects more and more forestry books—­some glossy-paged, others yellowing with small, faded fonts. They sprawl across the living room floor and pile in a wobbly stack on the bedside table. He loves the weight of the books in his hands. The oldest volumes, the ones with the feathery pages and split bindings, contain what feels like lost knowledge. As if Evan might be the last person to read them.

He never realized how much he didn’t know: grandmother trees and nursing logs; connected root networks and shared nutrients; the way trees talk to one another. He runs his fingertips over images of lacy white mycelium. He has lifetimes left of learning and this is only the beginning.

The message is unmistakable: The trees need to come first.

There are no more clear-cuts at Hale Timber. Instead, they only bring down trees near the end of their lives. Selective cutting retains diversity of species and a healthier canopy.